They stopped, exchanging questioning glances in the silent way of pack predators. The man who was their leader considered for perhaps eight heartbeats. Then he gestured with his sword and the crawl resumed. The essential meat of the matter had not changed. Regardless of what form it took, this was prey. That it was also strange might or might not mean greater profit, but one could only know that once the prey was taken.

So they took it.

Amber didn’t hear them; the light breeze hissing across the grass covered what nominal sound they made on their approach. She didn’t see them; the fire before her occupied all her attention. She had no warning whatsoever…and yet, for no reason, she looked back over her shoulder.

Her eyes locked at once and without immediate comprehension on the eyes of the raider’s leader. Her first thought, after the eternity of the split-second that followed, was that he had all Meoraq’s same features and still really looked nothing like him.

Then she dove for her spear, snatched it and a handful of skin-slicing grass off the ground, and swung to face him.

Their need for stealth now moot, they rose and fanned out without speaking, flanking her, herding her from the fire so expertly that she didn’t even know they were doing it until they had her away and closed in a ring around her.

‘Woman, they’re going to have you dead in about three seconds,’ Amber thought, stunned and a little embarrassed by this development. She had to do something fast, something unpredictable.

She lunged forward with a howl, then spun around and blindly stabbed. Her first feint, she thought vaguely. A damned effective one. The raider before her—now behind her—had drawn up his arms and crossed his blades to block her strike; the raider behind her—now before her—had rushed right on to the point of her spear. A good thing, too. If it hadn’t been for his strength and the power of his swift attack, she never could impaled him so deeply.

They stared at each other with what was left of the spear between them for what felt like hours and could not have been more than a single second. He said something in a tight, confused voice, but even though they were words she surely knew, Amber’s shocked mind could make no sense of them. She twisted vainly on the spear to try and free it, but succeeded only in making him belch blood all down his chest and hers, so she snatched the short, hooked sword out of his hand instead and shoved him back.

He fell, but the others closed in even tighter, and she had been reduced to the reach of her own arm and the dying man’s sword.

They eyed her as the man on the ground groaned and kicked, and Amber stood with the point of the curved blade jerking from one target to another.

“Ease off,” one of them said, and that time her brain made the translation without effort. He sheathed his sword and unhooked a short length of cord from his belt, weighted at both ends with bell-shaped lumps of metal. He began to back up, swinging this fun new toy in tight circles at his side, watching her. “Weapons down. I want it alive. Aqizu, stay behind it.”

She snatched a glance behind her, slashing at the lizardman’s throat, but he was too fast for her.

“I think it heard you,” one of them remarked.

“I think it understood you,” another added, more meaningfully. “That’s no animal.”

“When was the last time you saw an animal in clothes?” their leader asked in his calm, intent way. Without taking his eyes off her, without even seeming to move, he suddenly interrupted the steady shush-shush of his weighted cord with a throw. Amber darted aside and back, slashing wildly, but she was not his target; the weighted bell on the cord’s end crunched into the groaning man’s forehead, leaving a sickeningly bloodless hollow where it had landed. He pulled the line back with a zip and a flick of his wrist, resuming its steady circles without any sign of effort or interest in the fate of the man he’d just killed. “Keep your guard up. Do not hurt it. Go, Vek.”

She sensed more than saw the attack and swung around to meet it, slicing at the grasping hands and the face behind them indiscriminately. The blade of her sword skidded along his scales, then came down just right between his two middle fingers and sliced his hand in half all the way to his wrist. He let out a shriek right about the same instant the weighted cord wrapped itself around her arm.

Amber grabbed the sword from her trapped hand and let his zip-flick-tug take her right to him, but he was as fast as Meoraq and caught her wrist with a good six centimeters between the quivering tip of the short blade and his throat.

“Easy,” he said, almost singing it, the way another man might try to calm a stray dog. One hand pushed her weapon aside; the other swiftly reeled in the slack on his weighted cord until the chance to break his hold was good and gone. “Easy, little one. No one here will hurt you.”

“I mean to fucking hurt it!” Mr. Split-Hand snarled, bent double over his gushing arm. “I mean to hurt the damn thing plenty!”

“Quiet, Vek. Don’t fight me, little one. Your tiny bones look easy to break. For the moment, I want you whole.”

She struggled anyway, fighting a losing battle for just one chance to stab…but with the first flagging of her strength, he suddenly swept her arm around and pulled, letting her momentum carry her stumbling forward into the space he had just been, and then she was on her knees with him swiftly tying her wrists to her elbows behind her back. So she screamed, as pointless as that was, but wherever Meoraq was, he wasn’t there to hear her.

Maybe they’d found him first.

“Fierce little thing,” the leader grunted, planting his knee in the small of her back for the necessary leverage to catch and hold her legs together. She heard the shu-u-up as he pulled his belt off one-handed, a sound that had always meant Meoraq in an amorous mood, and Amber screamed again, uselessly.

“What are you going to do with it?” someone asked, nudging at her with his boot.

“There has always been coin for oddities. This is odder than most. Up, little one.” He pulled; her shoulders creaked in their sockets and she arched instinctively backwards, helping him pull her to her bound feet. He bent, his grip firm and impersonal, and tipped her up and over his shoulder.

She bit him, her teeth grating over two or three scales before she found a gripping place and dug in, scissoring her jaws together with all the strength she had left in her. Hot blood gushed into her mouth. He barked and flung her forwards again, inadvertently helping her rip away a scale so that she could spit it defiantly at his knees when she landed at his feet.

“God’s teeth,” someone remarked.

“Sharp teeth, at any rate,” the leader answered dryly. He checked the damage, which was nominal but bled heavily without any scales to help seal it, and as soon as he was finished shrugging off his harness and cinching it tight again with a bandage beneath it, he hunkered down before her and smiled. It was a gentle smile, disturbingly sincere, and it stayed that way as he showed Amber his open palm, drew it deliberately back and then slapped her hard across the mouth.

She hit the ground, sucking dirt up her nose and into her throat, so that all the involuntary brays of pain she made after that were choked. Now she could taste her blood, too, and feel the great, spreading heat of hurt where her lips had been mashed. But when his hand came down to cup her chin and turn her toward him, Amber exposed her bloody teeth at him and hissed through them, just like Meoraq did whenever he was good and pissed.

Several lizardmen stepped back.

The leader glanced tolerantly down at his chest where her defiant hiss had sprayed him with blood. He touched a few droplets, rubbed his fingers, then put out his hand. “Give me your belt, Vek.”